Forgot to mention: I had a EVGA GTX470, RMA'ed, card kept locking up and getting undetected at bootup. Got the problem while trying to install W7 too. Overall, for the little use that I got out of it, really nice card still.

I'm a nvidia fanboy so I'd say sli gtx470. The 465 is like a 5830, a big flunk imo for performance/price/energy consumption. With ATI you get eyefinity today, but NV should be coming up with their surround/3D vision shortly if you don't mind a little wait. Some reasons why I prefer nv over ati: 5800 series have a tiny hole that, from my experience with a 5870, is not enough for ventelation. ATI does not come with an IHS, so if you miss a tiny bit while reapplying thermal paste it'll be bad for the chip. NV also gives you physx officially supported, and gives you a physx chip along with the card. When changing memory speeds, ATI flickers your screen while NV doesn't. 5800's also suck with tesselation, one of the primary reasons for getting dx11 cards. NV is much better with tesselation enabled. Essentially, ATI cards have huge drops in fps whenever you blow up something or when you turn on tesselation. NV also takes a hit obviously, but it's a much more reasonable decrease in FPS, smaller than ATI's drop.

soooo yea, rock on NV fanboys, get the gtx470 SLI oh and I wouldn't worry too much about heat, fermi's do generate a lot of heat but the fermi's heat 'problem' has been exaggerated a lot by of people who then spread it on to other people.

I'm a nvidia fanboy so I'd say sli gtx470. The 465 is like a 5830, a big flunk imo for performance/price/energy consumption. With ATI you get eyefinity today, but NV should be coming up with their surround/3D vision shortly if you don't mind a little wait. Some reasons why I prefer nv over ati: 5800 series have a tiny hole that, from my experience with a 5870, is not enough for ventelation. ATI does not come with an IHS, so if you miss a tiny bit while reapplying thermal paste it'll be bad for the chip. NV also gives you physx officially supported, and gives you a physx chip along with the card. When changing memory speeds, ATI flickers your screen while NV doesn't. 5800's also suck with tesselation, one of the primary reasons for getting dx11 cards. NV is much better with tesselation enabled. Essentially, ATI cards have huge drops in fps whenever you blow up something or when you turn on tesselation. NV also takes a hit obviously, but it's a much more reasonable decrease in FPS, smaller than ATI's drop.

soooo yea, rock on NV fanboys, get the gtx470 SLI oh and I wouldn't worry too much about heat, fermi's do generate a lot of heat but the fermi's heat 'problem' has been exaggerated a lot by of people who then spread it on to other people.

It is not exaggerated at all. The Radeons are still king. If you want REAL GPU's then the good thing to do is Radeon all the way.

^^^ remember that lady who sued mcdonalds because she got burned by her cup of coffee? She won the case too....

I guess gf100 was made to withstand more heat, so they lowered the fan speed to make the card quieter. Maybe rv800 (or whatever it's called) can't take that much heat, so they run it at a lower temperature, which also doesn't burn the human hand. Fermi can run as hot as it wants as long as it's not 'bad' for it. If you don't mind the noise, you could also turn up the fan a bit so it runs at the same temperatures as 5800's where it doesn't burn. I've been slightly burned by many computer components before, including old naked southbridges, transistors/mosfets/vrms at 80*C which is about what a fermi runs at. That was hot enough to get my body to involuntarily jerk my hand off the component, so I guess the warning doesn't want the user dropping the card or something...

rapmaster: 5000's have significantly improved scaling since negative reviews for the last generations, but neither company can scale perfectly. imo NV's scaling is still better, but ATI has caught up a bit. Their 3 way CF still sucks though, and 2 way is not compatible with all games.Ooops nevermind this paragraph lol

rapmaster: 5000's have significantly improved scaling since negative reviews for the last generations, but neither company can scale perfectly. imo NV's scaling is still better, but ATI has caught up a bit. Their 3 way CF still sucks though, and 2 way is not compatible with all games.Ooops nevermind this paragraph lol

No cards can scale at 100%, the OP ask for 5850 crossfire vs GTX 470 SLI, which the 5850s scale better.